As it turns out, Melbourne IT became the registrar du jour, after Twitter, the NY Times and Huffington Post UK were all compromised.
The alleged ‘Syrian hackers’ manipulated the domain records of the domains registered with Melbourne IT, including the DNS and made changes to the ownership records.
Following the incident, Melbourne IT stated the compromise began when the credentials of a reseller were intercepted and used, and that other customer accounts were never in danger.
I see a problem right there, when registrar resellers use the “mother” label; when something goes wrong it’s the main company that takes the blame. It’s the same with franchise restaurants: when one’s quality of service falls behind, the brand takes a hit.
Regardless of the incident, my sole experience with Melbourne IT in the past wasn’t too bad. I was able to transfer a domain out after some nagging over twitter.
After yesterday’s twitter woes, it comes to show that twitter can be both a boon and a menace with regards to effective communications.
Curious.. Twitter, the NY Times and Huffington Post UK are using resellers and not working with the registrar directly? Typically bigger companies go for the more secure registrars, not towards non-ICANN accredited resellers.
KD – That’s the story according to MIT.
I would expect an extended ‘fallout’ on both sides affected: Melbourne IT and its security department, and the respective IT departments of the domains and web sites affected.
Yahoo is the largest reseller of melbourneit.com. I’m wondering if they were using Yahoo.
Donny – That’s quite possible. It’s strange how Yahoo.com is with Mark Monitor but they use Melbourne IT for AOL.com.
Hi Acro,
You re making a very good observation…sound strange those match companies toguether…. could they be working as a team? One of my biggest observation is a lot of problems at registrars with domains, especially with resellers.